4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico

The Pico’s documentation (a full-color quick installation fold-out guide, an installation CD and miscellaneous notices) is clean and well-executed-there’s no sense of corner-cutting there. The quick installation guide is stamped “Plug and Forget,” which is a little disconcerting to any practicing security professional but conveys its point well-you really can take your mind off this device and let it handle its own business.

A first-time use notice states that with the installation comes an automatic download of any and all relevant product updates. The process can take up to 15 minutes during which time the product is unusable. Although we personally did not encounter such a lengthy process, actual usage scenarios demonstrated that interruptions can also occur during regular hourly updates throughout the lifetime of the Pico Pro. There were points at which our casual surfing was interrupted by an update, leaving media-rich content pages suffering most visibly in the interim until the update completed (which seldom took more than 60 seconds to complete).

One issue did arise during installation on a Windows Vista desktop-for an unknown and unspecified reason, the installation media couldn’t be recognized as valid data (our machine kept asking to insert a CD or DVD). There was no problem using the same disk in our Windows XP notebook. Our simple solution is the next best thing: obtain an executable installer from the manufacturer’s Website. About a minute and some 6.8 MB later, the installer was downloaded and activated on our Vista machine. Setup was also a breeze, with standard Install Wizard-style prompts throughout its short-lived execution.

Upon activation, a notification dialog indicates that the Yoggie Pico Pro is now serving up secured connectivity. Around that same time, it also displayed an error message indicating when surfing the Web that the Yoggie security certificate was invalid for the site we chose. Our test machine was trying to reach http://yoggie.yoggie.com:8443, but was instead redirected to 172.16.0.1, which was the default address assigned to the Pico Pro. This message was quickly dismissed, after which we were able to configure and utilize the Pico Pro without further problems.

Initial setup is standard fare that includes: default language preference; a EULA agreement; and your name, e-mail and license key. Then the Yoggie Pico Pro begins the process of gathering security-related information to improve the quality of its products and services, which you can opt-out of sharing with Yoggie. We chose not to and skipped to the next screen, which prompted us to designate an alternate password-the default is, not surprisingly, “yoggie”-and time zone. We do recommend at least changing the administrative password (note: this is a separate password than what is used to activate and deactivate Yoggie on the task bar); there are network-accessible devices out there already serving default passwords, why go and give yours away?